suprgeek

This our terrifying future in America - the incoming administration has very scant regard for civil liberties, and is filled with business insiders who worship money above all else.

Add to this the fact that both legislative chambers are controlled by the same party who is "tough" on crime.

For profit or to ostensibly address Terrorism expect surveillance to get much worse.

Another Parable:

I heard this in a presentation that was emphasizing the need to actually speak to the Ops folks before deploying the solutions that dev dreamed up:

A toothpaste factory had a problem: Due to the way the production line was set up, sometimes empty boxes were shipped without the tube inside. People with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming off of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment (which cannot be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean quality assurance checks must be smartly distributed across the production line so that customers all the way down to the supermarket won’t get frustrated and purchase another product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory gathered the top people in the company together. Since their own engineering department was already stretched too thin, they decided to hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem.

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP (request for proposal), third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later a fantastic solution was delivered — on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. The problem was solved by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box would weigh less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box off the line, then press another button to re-start the line.

A short time later, the CEO decided to have a look at the ROI (return on investment) of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. There were very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That was some money well spent!” he said, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.

The number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. How could that be? It should have been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers indicated the statistics were indeed correct. The scales were NOT picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Perplexed, the CEO traveled down to the factory and walked up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before the scale, a $20 desk fan was blowing any empty boxes off the belt and into a bin. Puzzled, the CEO turned to one of the workers who stated, “Oh, that…One of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang!”

http://cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.ht...

What is really galling about the whole saga is that this will end up costing lives and pain.

1. Some people might have gotten incorrect blood work results as a consequence of hyped-but-BS techniques like the nano-tainers. Some portion of these will result in unnecessary treatments/pain/suffering.

2. Any future player in the same space must now work triple hard to bring real changes to healthcare stuff - this means delays and lives lost that would have been otherwise saved.

Elizabeth Holmes belongs in prison - plain and simple. There is blood on her hands.

I have been following the low/no sugar approach for a coupe of years. Some results (some may/may not be directly attributable just to low sugar)

1) Most restaurant foods, even the savory section, have an undercurrent of sweetness that is almost overpowering

2) I cannot eat any commercial cakes/cookies even on very special occasions, the sweetness makes you gag

3) No more post lunch slump - this one was surprising to me

4) Birthdays/Anniversaries are awkward during the "food time"

5) No colas/juice/shakes/smoothies; yes to Coffee,tea,lime water with honey or just Water - I started to have spare change much more often so now i invest in the occasional top shelf vodka :)

6) Dropped about 6 Pounds in the first six months

7) Less jittery-ness thru the day

All-in-all positive effects with some social awkwardness

I think this "assurance" pretty much confirms for me that Apple has internally begun to shift even more resources away from the Mac and the Macbook.

The very weak nature of the response which really does not provide any specifics what-so-ever is very typical when the underlying reality matches the rumor but the guy in charge just can't say it yet.

Tim Cook is Apple's Ballamer - An ops. guy, great for the bottom line but fundamentally stuck in the past.

As an oldster - two things that I really wish my younger self would have intimately realized.

1) As a software person your are employed to Solve Business Problems - NOT to write code, NOT to write tests, NOT to hack on platforms, NOT to be Agile. Solve the problem (or add the feature) - never lose sight of this. The value you bring is directly related to this.

2) People outside software development don't give a flying f* about most issues software related - but everyone has a computer, so most are poorly informed about technology and terrible at making right software choices - build products accordingly.

The young'uns here probably have not lived thru the Microsoft era in the 90s when "Embrace Extend Extinguish" was the operating motto and any Market where MS entered would send competitors quaking in fear.

They were late to the internet party and then under the disastrous leadership of Ballamer (mindshare wise, not revenue) they completely lost the plot.

Now they are indeed enjoying a resurgence, less evil, more relevant and surprisingly accepting of Open source software. How the world turns....

So the Watchdog RETALIATED against some one who brought wrongdoing to light... Isn't this jokers Job Description pretty much the protection of exactly these whistle blowers ?

The cognitive dissonance here is almost too much to bear

What they could have done (one or more):

1) Bezel-less display

2) Full Touch screen

3) Detachable Screen - IPad Pro +

4) Stylus input (from Apple Pencil)

5) 15-20 hr battery life

6) NVidia Graphics

7) 64 Gb Ram option

8) Kept the HDMI & SDXC port

What they did do:

1) Gimmicky Touch bar - Useless when you close the MBP & Dock; Hard to do for touch typists

2) Hiked the prices by crazy margins

3) Pegged the RAM at 16 Gb Max

4) Battery is not much better

5) All in on USB-C - Get ready for Dongle-o-rama

Feels like a pure greedy money grab with nothing to justify it. Steve must be spinning in his grave.

Multiple puzzling decisions -

1) The Esc and the Space keys are the two I most often use without looking - now I have to f*ing look down to hit esc?

2)What about a hard boot? Is the power key now a soft key as well? Non-removable battery and a soft reboot key do not make a good mix

3) Key press and travel distance look to be shallow - not a very satisfying experience

4) Please don't make it any thinner at the expense of ports or battery life

5) The charging port is no longer Magsafe

All in all seems a bit more gimmicky and "change for change's sake" rather than a solid upgrade

Off-Duty or On-Duty Policemen are under the belief that any questioning - "Aggressive Talk" i.e. even non-cursing but impolite language is grounds for immediate "stomping".

Unless you immediately comply they will physically harm you. Until a few high-profile examples are made where this kind of behavior is harshly punished (dismissal, imprisonment, etc) they will not change.

The first amendment is meaningless if you get shot/beaten/jailed every time you speak aggressively in front of the Government.

The librarian while a Hero is largely collateral damage - this is story about Police brutality pure and simple.

What is not mentioned in the very thin article is that this scumbag who ruined many people's lives gets to walk-away with $134 Million [1].

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/10/12/wells...

Yet if a common man had committed any of the fraud - they would be very likely in jail.

Lets hope that it is a promise for innovation and not a threat of dirty tricks. people should not be declaring it as some kind of "Musk victory". These guys do not play fair and have deep pockets.

You can beat Musk to Mars one of two ways:

1) You innovate better/faster than SpaceX and get there sooner

2) You slow down SpaceX by legal/ political/other means until your company can get a lead.

Given all the dirty tricks[1],[2] & possibly [3] that ULA (50-50 partnership Boeing & Lockheed) has played in the past, I would not put it past them to do #2.

[1] https://defensesystems.com/articles/2014/04/28/spacex-protes...

[2] http://spacenews.com/ula-vp-resigns-following-remarks-on-com...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/implication-...

The scariest part of the whole piece answers this question: Why are back doors with secret keys a BAD idea?

"... he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails...."

The CEO of Yahoo must have known that this kind of scanning and storage puts their users at risk. She choose to do it anyway as being the path of least resistance against a more powerful adversary (US govt.). Bad judgement compounded by zero spine... Verizon looks like the perfect fit.

"Manipulating the media" - what about the much more serious concern of the revolving door between Big Pharma and the FDA?

This door spins almost as fast as the one between the Big Banks and the SEC.

The current commissioner of the FDA used to be a paid consultant for the the Pharma industry and that was the reason they backdoored him into the spot [1] (after getting him in as some other position)

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/health/fda-nominee-califfs...

The Hackers groups are doing what they can to expose Mylan's (EpiPen makers) Greed which is laudable. What is really needed is also an explainer on why a bit of govt. leverage (socialism if you will) is good in Medicine Pricing as well.

Mylan is a really great user of buying legislation. They leveraged their 90% market ownership of the epinephrine auto-injector market such that

[1] It lobbied hard to ensure that all parents of school going kids (or tax payers) paid for EpiPens by making it into a bill that politicians could easily justify.

Once the bill passed and schools all over the country purchased these by the boatloads, then they just kept raising the price over and over and milking the profits.

When it got too much and they could not ignore the patient backlash they have turned again to purchasing legislation..

[2] Now they want to make it so that the patients do not see the copays - instead every one suffers by paying more for health insurance.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/billsum.php?id=hr2094-113

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/business/epipen-maker-myla...

With scumbags like these, is it any wonder that the USA has the most expensive healthcare system in the world?

Now this is an exercise in doublespeak:

1) Rather than avail himself of the many lawful avenues to express legal, moral, or ethical qualms with U.S. intelligence activities, Mr. Snowden stole 1.5 million classified documents from National Security Agency networks.

WRONG - He has stated many times that he did approach all manner of "Oversight" people who basically told him to shut up. What happened to Tomas Drake and the others who tired the insider approach - nothing ever came of it.

2)...vast majority ofthe documents had nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests

How do you verify this? you can't

3)..In the course of doing so, he infiringed on the privacy of thousands of his friends, colleagues, and fellow citizens

Meanwhile the NSA was illegally infringing the privacy of almost 310 million americans

4) The material Mr. Snowden stole pertains to lawful intelligence activities authorized and overseen by all three branches of govemment.

- the activities were NOT lawful (as in legally defensible when challenged in a court), they were not overseen by anyone and some of them were unrelated to intelligence.

What a bunch of gutless hypocrites.

The annoying problem of being unable to select via Enter key the first item in the address bar that is shown while typing any text is back.

Using OldBar on FF48 on a MAC

type text into address bar - Key down to select first entry

Hit enter - nothing happens

Obscured under " Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning " is the cold hard truth that that learning will be paid for in lives - mostly of Tesla drivers possibly of others.

The rates of accidents in manual vs current version of autopilot may work out to be favorable - (and that is still under debate) - but there certainly will be people who will die (and have died) due to a premature roll-out of Autopilot and their trust of it. This is some bloody cold calculation

Lets not forget that they are speaking about neutrinos - particles that are notoriously hard to detect precisely because they hardly interact with "regular" matter.

So the fact that they traveled hundreds? of miles still in superposition states just means that they did not interact with anything over those distances.

I am failing to understand how this is weird, in-fact this is exactly what the theory calls for.

Note that another possible Autopilot Crash is now being investigated: http://electrek.co/2016/07/06/nhtsa-probing-tesla-model-x-ro...

As I have noted before: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=12012688&goto=item%3Fi...

TESLA really needs to tread carefully here to avoid giving the whole Self-Driving Tech a bad name.

You CANNOT move fast and Break Things in this particular case.

While it may be manageable for most, I wonder at what point it becomes downright dangerous for people in critical jobs.

It would be interesting to do an analysis of say Muslim Surgeons observing Ramadan fasts and the numbers and types medical errors during the fasting vs non-fasting periods.

Or the Pilots on Fast and Long Haul flights who have been fasting daily for a month....

Here is the meat of the Post:

"Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S"

1) The Sensors did not "see" the trailer due to Bright sunlight & <XYZ> 2) The Collision was at the WindShield Level and above but not to the Front

Neither of these sound like "Extremely Rare" occurrences. That part is just pure PR Spin.

Request for TESLA - You are doing great things to move the whole industry forward. Do not F* it up by being too aggressive here.

1) Do not rely on purely Visual cues use (multiple) Radars/LiDARs/Some thing that works irrespective of Visible Light conditions - so an additional Radar unit on Top that is checking for obstacles at the height of the car would make sense.

2) Improved Crash sensors

Till then DISABLE the system except in very limited circumstances even if the owner tries to activate it. This is NOT a "Move Fast and Break things" situation. Some poor soul lost his life because of Tesla's inability to foresee this situation lulled him into a false sense of complacency (and partly his own inattention).

I see a future where as the "rise of the machines" takes hold in things like News Items, Stories, Poetry, Paintings, Movies etc, there will be a commensurate rise in Detection software. The detection software would flag things as human-generated vs machine-generated.

Pretty soon anything created by Humans will be intrinsically more valuable just because it was human-created and hence somehow better than "machine-generated".

We live in interesting times...

He is not "wrapping" the very language. He is trying to correct the semantic imbalance that is tilted towards the $100 Billion corporation. The thing you need to grok about RMS is that he is a purist.

This fact strikes many people as stubborn, too idealistic, impractical etc - except that from RMS perspective it is the least he could do to stay true to himself.

Also consider this - the world of software has been infinitely enriched by RMS (and the like) so he has the absolute right to put forth arguments with the expectation that software developers pay attention.

Facebook on the other hand has not done so - to put it mildly.

Great Product - Congrats on thinking thru and designing for a "Wire-Free" experience, with Solar batteries and the clever hack of the OBD port connector to offload some functions (wake-up on reversing etc).

That said - it seems it is 2-3 years too late to be launching this.

1)By 1 May 2018, all new US Cars will have back-up cameras by law [1]

2) Most Cars sold since 2011/12 seem to have integrated back-up cameras

3) $500 for a Car accessory (!) that by definition will be fitted on a lower end car older model (since high end cars had this for a while) aka Low sales.

4)OBD port contention

Pivot Idea - Dash cam recorder (go in front plate) with AI for alerting based on User set rules (in addition to Dash Cam recording)

[1]: https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/nhtsa-announces...

Edit: Why in the name of funk did you design your website to take away manual scrollability? If I want to quickly skim it I have to endure the pointless transitions - I get that you want to enforce a certain flow - but let me cleanly escape out of it as well,

So I need a secondary device to complete my Laptop/desktop Safari-only purchase?

Not-likely.

As usual a Stupid and Kneejerk reaction - BAN IT. No efforts at balancing security concerns with convenience for regular citizens. If you think this is strange try to photograph a few Court Houses or colonial era ministry building in New Delhi - see how quickly the cops get on your case.

"Satanic Verses" hurts religious sentiments - BAN IT (never mind the freedom of expression debate).

Couple of Files on very popular file sharing sites violate copyrights - SHUT IT DOWN (never mind the convenience).

Plastic Bags causing pollution - BAN IT (never mind the convenience or the fact that no one enforces it).

Alcohol Addiction is a problem in some states - BAN IT (never mind that the so called "dry states" of India have some of the highest alcohol consumption rates).

and so on....

So in India BAN IT is a very popular Judicial/Legislative response.

Slightly relevant - about Oracle and its single-minded pursuit of money over all else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

Tesla is innovating rapidly in the Autonomous driving space AND releasing those inventions to the customer, which is great.

Typically these things used to take 5-7years to "trickle down" where a reasonably-priced car (not that $80k is reasonable) might have these available for end users.

However Tesla absolutely NEEDS to do more to prevent this technology push model that they have from tainting the whole Autonomous Driving trend. Expecting that a Driver will read the f'ing manual about

"....Traffic-aware cruise control may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h) ....Depending on TrafficAware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death."

is insane.

My suggestion: Enforce a must watch video tutorial with questions (such as is common for say a driving test) before enabling the Partial AutoDrive. It really is a matter of Life or Death - you have a very short time to react on the road. With their distribution model Tesla definately has the resources to pull this off, and might serve as a model for the rest of the industry.